Return Engagement

by Harry Turtledove

  "Do I?" Sam thought about it. "Well, maybe I do. But I could have thrown it into, say, being a machinist's mate just as easy."

  "So what? Could have doesn't count for anything, not in this man's navy," Commander Cressy said crisply. "You are what you are, and I'm damn glad to have you on my ship." He clapped Carsten on the back and went on his way, dodging the stream from another hose as smoothly as a halfback sidestepping a tackler. Whatever he did, he did well.

  And he likes me, Sam thought. I'm only a mustang, a sunburned sea rat up through the hawse hole, but he likes me. That made him feel better about himself than he had since . . . since . . . He laughed. He was damned if he remembered when anything had made him feel better.

  A sunburned sea rat he certainly was. Orders had gone out for all hands to wear long sleeves and not to roll them up regardless of the weather. Action had shown that protected against flash burns when shells and bombs burst. Sam had been wearing long sleeves for more than thirty years. That way, he burned only from the wrists down and from the neck up: a dubious improvement, but an improvement nonetheless.

  After the festivities that went with crossing the Equator, routine returned to the Remembrance. Drills picked up as the ship and the accompanying task force neared Argentine waters. General quarters sounded at all hours of the day and night. It bounced men out of their bunks and hammocks. It pulled them out of the showers. Sailors laughed when their comrades ran to battle stations naked and dripping, clothes clutched under one arm. But they didn't laugh too much. Most of them had been caught the same way at one time or another. And besides, with the task force where it was, nobody could be sure when a drill might turn into the real thing.

  The summer sun receded in the north. Sam still suffered, but not so severely. He might have been the only man aboard who looked forward to rounding Cape Horn in the Southern Hemisphere's winter. There, if nowhere else south of the Yukon, the weather suited his skin.

  One of the destroyers in the task force detected, or thought she detected, a submersible. She dropped depth charges. Down deep in the bowels of the Remembrance, Sam listened to the ashcans bursting one by one. They were too far away to shake the ship as they would have at closer range.

  "Hope they sink the son of a bitch," one of the soldiers in the damage-control party said savagely.

  "Not me," Sam said. Everybody looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. He explained: "I hope there's no sub there at all. I hope they're plastering the hell out of a whale, or else that the hydrophone operator's got a case of the galloping fantods."

  "Why?" Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger asked, real curiosity in his voice. "Don't you want to see the enemy on the bottom?"

  "Oh, hell, yes, sir, if that's the only boat out there," Sam told his superior. "But they're liable to hunt in packs. If we get one, there may be more. I'd just as soon there weren't any."

  Pottinger pursed his lips, then slowly nodded. "You've got kind of a lefthanded way of looking at things, don't you? Can't say you're wrong, though."

  They never found out whether the destroyer sank the submersible, or whether a sub had been there at all. The only evidence was negative: no torpedoes streaked toward any ship in the task force. If the sub had been there, and if it had been sunk, it was a lone wolf, not part of a pack.

  No Argentine airplanes came out to harry the Remembrance and her satellites. Argentina and the USA were formally at war, but that was because Argentina did so much to feed England and France, and the United States threatened her commerce. The task force was bound for the Pacific. If provoked, though, it might pause. Maybe the Americans had quietly warned they would pause if provoked. Sam didn't know anything about that. As far as he could tell, nobody on the Remembrance did. He did know he was glad not to have to fight his way past Argentina.

  The Argentines hadn't unbent enough to let the task force through the Straits of Magellan. The U.S. ships had to go around Tierra del Fuego and through the thunderous seas of Cape Horn. It felt like the devil's sleigh ride: up one mountainous wave after another, then down the far side. Some of those waves broke over the carrier's bow, sending sea surging across the flight deck and carrying away anything that wasn't lashed down and quite a bit that was. A sailor on one of the accompanying destroyers got washed overboard. He was gone before his mates had any chance to rescue him.

  Vomit's sharp stink filled the corridors of the Remembrance. The stoves in the galleys were put out; the pitching was too much for them. Chow was sandwiches and cold drinks, not that many men had much appetite. Sam was a good sailor, but even he was off his feed.

  What really amazed him was the knowledge that things could have been worse. A hundred years earlier, clippers had rounded the Horn on sail power, going into the teeth of the howling westerly gale. He admired the men aboard those ships without wanting to imitate them. The passage was hard enough with 180,000 horsepower on his side.

  And then, at last, they were through. The Pacific began to live up to its name. The stoves were lit again. Hot meals returned. The crew felt good enough to eat them, and to clamor for more. And all the task force had to deal with were the Chileans, who were irked the U.S. ships hadn't punished their Argentine enemies. After what the Remembrance had just been through, mere diplomacy felt like child's play.

  ****

  JONATHAN MOSS spotted a flight of Mules buzzing along above northern Ohio. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a predatory grin. The gull-winged Confederate dive bombers raised hell with U.S. infantry. But they were sitting ducks for fighters. He spoke into the wireless for the men of his squadron: "You see 'em, boys? Two o'clock low, just lollygagging along and waiting for us. Let's go get 'em."

  He pushed the stick forward. The Wright fighter dove. The squadron followed him down. They'd been trying to do too much with too little for too long. Now they had a chance to take a real bite out of the Confederates. Those damned Asskickers were like flying artillery, pounding U.S. positions ordinary shellfire couldn't hurt. Take them out and the Confederate ground attack would suffer.

  Nobody could say the men who flew the Mules were asleep at the switch. They scattered when they spotted the U.S. fighters stooping on them. Some dove for the deck. Others hightailed it back toward the Confederate lines.

  Moss picked his target: a Mule scooting along just above the treetops. The rear gunner saw him, and started shooting. A stream of tracers flew from the back of the Mule's long cockpit toward him.

  His grin got wider and more savage. The Mule had one machine gun. He had half a dozen, and a much steadier gun platform than a jinking bomber. His finger jabbed the firing button on top of the stick. The leading edges of the Wright's wings spouted flame as the guns hammered away. He held the dive, careless of the enemy's fire. The best way to knock an airplane down was to do your shooting from as close as you could.

  He fired another burst into the Mule. The rear gunner stopped shooting. Moss was close enough to see him slumped over his gun. Flame ran back from the wing root along the dive bomber's fuselage. The Mule suddenly heeled over and slammed into the ground. Flame and smoke volcanoed upward. The pilot had never had a chance.

  "Scratch one bandit!" Moss shouted exultantly, and then clawed for altitude. He wanted more of those Asskickers burning, and he thought he knew how to get what he wanted, too.

  But then one of his pilots yelled, "Bandits! Bandits at three o'clock high!" Moss' exultation turned to cold sweat on the instant.

  As his fighters had had the advantage of altitude against the Mules, so the Confederate Hound Dogs had the edge on the Wrights. The C.S. fighters tore into them, guns blazing. Frantic shouts came from Moss' wireless set. A couple of them cut off abruptly as fighters or pilots were hit.

  He'd been late pulling up. Too late. Here came a Hound Dog, diving on him. He twisted to try to meet it. Too late again. Machine-gun bullets and a couple of shells from the cannon that fired through the Confederate fighter's propeller hub stitched across his machine's left wing and fuselage. The engine
made a horrible grinding noise. Smoke poured from it. Suddenly Moss was flying a glider that didn't want to glide.

  He had to get out–if he could. The controls still answered, after a fashion. He got the crippled fighter over onto its back, opened the canopy, undid the harness that held him in his armored seat, and fell free.

  The slipstream tore at him. He just missed killing himself by smashing into the Wright's tail. Then he was clear of the airplane, clear and falling toward the ground far below–far below now, but drawing closer with inexorable speed.

  He yanked the ripcord. Folded silk spilled out from the pack on his back. He'd put the parachute in there himself. If it didn't open the way it was supposed to, he'd curse himself all the way down.

  Whump! The shock when the canopy opened was enough to make him bite his tongue. He tasted blood in his mouth. Considering what might have happened, he wasn't complaining. He hung in midair. All at once, he went from brick to dandelion puff. Even so, he would sooner have done this for fun than to save his own neck.

  His fighter hit the ground and burst into flames, just like the Mule he'd shot down. And he hadn't finished saving his own neck, either–here came the Hound Dog that had knocked him out of the sky. Or maybe it was another one–he couldn't tell. But he'd never felt more helpless than he did now, hanging in the air.

  During the Great War, hardly any fliers had worn a parachute. The ones who did were reckoned fair game till they got to the ground. If that Confederate pilot wanted to fire a machine-gun burst into him, he couldn't do one goddamn thing about it. He had a .45 on his hip, but he didn't bother to reach for it.

  Instead of shooting, the Confederate waggled his wings and zoomed away. Moss thought he saw the other man wave inside the cockpit, but the Hound Dog was gone too fast for him to be sure. He waved his thanks, but he didn't know if the Confederate could see that, either.

  "They aren't all bastards," he said, as if someone had claimed they were. He felt weak and giddy with relief. To his disgust, he also realized he felt wet. Somewhere back there, he'd pissed himself. He shrugged inside the parachute harness. He wasn't the first flier who'd done that, and he wouldn't be the last. When he got down on the ground, he'd clean himself off. That was all he could do. Only dumb luck he hadn't filled his pants, too.

  He swung his weight to the left, trying to steer the chute away from the trees below and towards a stretch of grass. Was he over Confederate-held territory, or did the USA still have a grip here? He didn't know. Pretty damn soon, he'd find out.

  He passed over a pine almost close enough to kick it on the way down. There was the meadow, coming up. He bent his knees, braced for the impact–and twisted his ankle anyhow. "Son of a bitch!" he said loudly. The chute tried to drag him across the field. He pulled out his knife and sawed at the shrouds. After what seemed a very long time, he cut himself free. He tried to get to his feet. The ankle didn't want to bear his weight. He could hobble, but that was about it.

  From behind him, somebody said, "Hold it right there, asshole!" Moss froze. Was that a U.S. or a C.S. accent? He hadn't been able to tell. The soldier said, "Turn around real slow, and make sure I can see both hands are empty."

  Moss couldn't turn any way but slowly. He whooped when he saw the man pointing a rifle at him wore green-gray. "I'm Jonathan Moss, major, U.S. Army Air Force," he said.

  "Yeah, sure, buddy, and I'm Queen of the May," the U.S. soldier said. For a dreadful moment, Moss thought his career would end right there, finished by someone on his own side. But then the soldier said, "I see you're heeled. Drop your piece, and don't do anything stupid or you'll never find out who wins the Champions' Cup this year."

  "Whatever you say." Moss fished his pistol out of the holster with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He dropped it on the ground, then took a couple of limping steps away from it. "Get me back to your CO. I'll show him I'm legit."

  The soldier came forward and scooped up the .45. Never for an instant did his Springfield stop pointing at Moss' brisket. "Maybe you will and maybe you won't," he said. "But all right–I've pulled your teeth. Come along. You better not try anything funny, or that's all she wrote."

  "I'm coming," Moss said. "I can't run, not on this leg." The soldier in green-gray only shrugged. Maybe he thought Moss was faking. Moss wished he were. He asked, "Where the hell are we, anyway? I flew out of Indiana, and I got all turned around in the last dogfight."

  "If my lieutenant wants you to know, he'll tell you," the soldier answered. "Can't you move any faster than that?"

  "Now that you mention it," Moss said, "no." Behind him, the soldier scattered unprintables the way Johnny Appleseed had scattered seeds. The sputter of bad language eased but didn't stop when they got in under the trees. Moss was glad to get out of the meadow, too; one of those Hound Dogs might have paid a return visit, and shooting up soldiers caught in the open was any pilot's sport.

  "Halt!" an unseen voice called. "Who goes there?"

  "No worries, Jonesy–it's me," Moss' captor (rescuer?) replied. "I got me a flyboy–says he's one of ours. He don't talk like a Confederate, but he don't quite talk like one of us, neither." That's what I get for living in Canada for most of twenty years–I started sounding like a Canuck, Moss thought unhappily.

  "Well, bring him on," Jonesy said. "Lieutenant Garzetti will figure out what the hell to do with him."

  Lieutenant Giovanni Garzetti was a little dark man in his late twenties who looked as if he'd never smiled in his whole life. He made his headquarters in a barn that had had one corner blown off by a shell. He looked Moss and his gear over, asked him a few questions, and said, "Yeah, you're the goods, all right." He turned to the soldier who'd brought in the fighter pilot. "Give him back his sidearm, Pratt."

  "Yes, sir," the soldier said. This was the first time Moss had heard his name. Pratt took the .45 off his belt and handed it back. "Here you go. I didn't want to take any chances with you, you know what I mean?"

  Moss could tell he wouldn't get any more of an apology than that. He nodded as he slid the pistol into the holster again. "Don't worry about it."

  "So what can we do for you, Major?" Lieutenant Garzetti asked.

  "A bandage for my ankle and a lift to the closest airstrip would be good," Moss answered. "I can't walk for beans, but I expect I can still fly."

  "Pratt, go chase down a medic," Garzetti said. The soldier sketched a salute and departed. Garzetti nodded to Moss. "We'll get you wrapped up good. Meanwhile . . ." He pulled a little silver flask out of his pocket. "Have a knock of this."

  This was some of the best–certainly the most welcome–bourbon Moss had ever drunk. "Anesthetic," he said solemnly, and Garzetti nodded. The lieutenant took a drink from the flask when Moss returned it. Then he put it in his pocket once more. Was he a quiet lush? He didn't act like one. If he fancied a drink every now and then . . . well, Moss fancied a drink every now and then, too. "Boy, that hit the spot. You sure you aren't part St. Bernard?"

  Lieutenant Garzetti still didn't smile. His eyes twinkled, though. "If you said on my mother's side, you'd've called me a son of a bitch."

  "That's not what I meant!" Moss exclaimed.

  "I know it's not, and I'm not flabbling about it," Garzetti said. A man with a Red Cross armband came in through the missing corner of the barn. "Here's the medic. Let's see what he can do."

  After poking and prodding at Moss' ankle, the medic said, "I don't think it's busted, Major, but you sure as hell ought to get it X-rayed first chance you find."

  Moss only laughed. "And when's that likely to be?"

  "Beats me, sir, but you ought to. You can mess yourself up bad, trying to do too much on a busted ankle. In the meantime . . ." In the meantime, the medic used what seemed a mummy's worth of gauze to wrap the injured part. "There you go. Try that. Tell me how it is. If you're not happy, I'll put some more on."

  How? Moss wondered. He got to his feet. The ankle still complained when he put weight on it, but it didn't scream so loud. He c
ould walk, after a fashion. "Thanks," he said. "It's not perfect, but it's an awful lot better. And as long as I can get into a fighter, what else do I need?" Neither the medic nor Lieutenant Garzetti had anything to say to that.

  ****

  SCIPIO WATCHED bored cops herd colored factory workers onto their buses near the edge of the Terry. He'd got used to that. It bothered him less than it had when he first saw it. The buses brought the workers back every evening. They really did take the men and women to do war work. They didn't haul them off to those camps from which nobody ever came back. "Come on. Keep moving," a cop said. "You got to–"

  The world blew up.

  That was how it seemed to Scipio, anyhow. One minute, he was walking along the streets, watching the workers board the buses and thinking about what he'd be doing once he got to the Huntsman's Lodge. The next, he was rolling on the ground, tearing out both knees of his tuxedo pants and clapping his hands to his ears in a useless, belated effort to hold out that horrible sound.

  Afterwards, he realized that the buses had shielded him from the worst of the blast. The motorcar bomb went off across the street from them. If they hadn't been in the way, the twisted metal junk screeching through the air in all directions probably would have cut him down, too. As things were, he got a couple of little cuts from flying glass, but nothing worse than that.

  Head ringing from the force of the explosion, he staggered upright again. He heard everything as if from very far away. He knew his hearing could come back to normal in a couple of days. A hell of a country, he thought, when you know how things are after a bombing on account of you've been through them before.

  When he looked at what the bomb had done to the buses and to the people waiting for them, his stomach did a slow lurch. All four buses were burning furiously. That would have been even worse if they'd had gasoline engines rather than using diesel fuel, but it was plenty bad enough as things were. One of them lay on its side; another had been twisted almost into a right angle. And the people . . .